From the Editor

My father's library was not large. It barely covered a wall of his study. Books placed on shelves intermingled with historical artifacts. He was never terribly well situated and located in life: he made do with the world he created and the various characters that orbited at different proximities to his home. He was certainly “worldly,” in the sense of having travelled and even worked away from the place of his birth. But I think he was always a fish out of water, never fully involved in the place he lived, and mostly living just out of town or in a high-rise apartment on a floor sufficiently elevated to create the experience of distance and remove, rather than perspective. He inhabited the edges and margins of the life he placed himself in.

The various objects that cohabited with his books would be hard to categorize — but one thing that was clear was that few people would recognize or relate to what I presume was significant to him. There were, of course, the customary photos, more often than not selected by my mother, taken to the framing shop by her and probably placed with her slightly better aesthetic on the shelf at eye level. The rest of the objects d'art (a generous term) were haphazardly placed between texts, in front or at the end of a row that abruptly ended and appeared to be waiting for companion volumes.

My father's collection of artifacts consisted of pieces of memorabilia from his life, moments in time where he had bumped into real life, some of which he came away from confused and others with the simple pleasure that life offers if we are not too preoccupied. These representations of moments had very little intrinsic value. He cared little for art and, probably because he did not understand it, tended to hold it at a distance. Nevertheless, the books and their accompanying knickknacks were a vertical canvas, the contents of which were his statements on life. Hardships had left him with the capacity for commentary but little room or space for reflectio